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must be some persons in the world whose views and feelings accorded with his own; and that, if there were any minister of that description, he would gladly become his curate, and serve him gratis." Soon after this purpose had been passing through his mind, through the influence of his father he found himself minister of Trinity Church, one of the largest places of worship in Cambridge, and where, for upwards of fifty years, he proclaimed the salvation which he himself had found. The career of opposition and obloquy which he ran passing off into universal esteem and homage, from the time that a gownsman would blush to cross the quadrangle in his company, till bishops were calling on him, three together, and till that bleak November day, when the mourning University bore him to his tomb, beneath the stately roof of king Henry's Chapel-the triumph of faith and energy over long hostility, may encourage other witnesses for obnoxious truth, and is amply detailed in Mr. Carus' bulky volume. We only wish to indicate the particular work which we believe that Mr. Simeon did. Filling, and eventually with great ascendancy, that commanding pulpit, for more than half a century, and meeting in his own house weekly scores of candidates for the Church of England ministrywe do not hesitate to say, that of all men Simeon did the most to mould the recent and existing evangelism of the Southern Establishment. And in his first and most fervent days untrammelled, because persecuted and unflattered, he did a noble work. The impulse which he then gave was purely evangelistic, and men like Thomason, and Henry Martyn, and Daniel Wilson, were the product. But as he got older and more honoured, when he found that in the persons of his friends and pupils, and through his writings, he had become an important integral of the Established Church, if he did not become less evangelical be became more hierarchical. He still loved the Gospel; but the Church was growing kind, and he was coaxed into a more ardent episcopacy and more exact conformity. The Church was actually improved, and personal acquaintances mounting the bench put a still more friendly face on it. He began to hope that evangelism would prevail among the clergy, and that they might prove, if not the sole, the most successful agency for diffusing the Gospel. And strong in this belief, he began to blush at the excesses of his youthful zeal, and inculcate on his student-friends reverence for the Rubric and obedience to the Bishop. He bought patronages and presentations, and bestirred all his energies to form a ministry evangelical but regular, episcopal but earnest. Volunteering his services and accepted by the under-graduates, he became virtual Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology to the University of Cambridge.

Simeon's Mental Characteristics.

335

In fulfilment of this task, he inspired no grand ideas. His mind was not telescopic. He did not look to the Church universal's long future, nor to the position of his own Church relatively to Christendom. But he looked to England as it then was, and as he assumed the it ever would be; and he looked out for new Bishops and advowsons in the market and present openings for an Evangelical clergy-the painstaking overseer of his own repairs, but not prophetic enough to foretell the alterations that would be eventually needed, nor creative enough to suggest them. The minds of his respectful listeners were not stimulated by the proposal of great schemes and noble purposes; even as they were not invigorated by fresh and sublime presentations of familiar truth. And he taught no system. He loved every text and dreaded none, and gloried in laying on each successively an equal stress. According to his text, a hearer might imagine him either Calvinist or Arminian, High Churchman or Low. To evade no text and exaggerate none was his object; and this was well: but we rather suspect that the Bible contains pervasive principles, prepollent and overmastering truths, and that a firm hold of these is very needful for the interpretation of the individual texts. And of this we are very sure, that no energetic ministry nor wide reformation has ever arisen without one or other of these cardinal truths as its watchword and rallying-cry. In Simeon's Theology there was nothing equivalent to Luther's Jehovah-Tsidkenu, nor Wesley's golden sentence, "God is Love."

But if not grand he was earnest, and if not comprehensive he was orderly and methodical. A man of routine rather than of system, he was a pattern of punctuality and neatness in his person, and a model of clear and accurate arrangement in his sermons. He liked to see work well done, and was therefore tempted to do too much himself. To ensure the preaching of a good sermon, whatever the text might be, he actually printed for the guidance of ministers twenty dense volumes of Helps to Composition. Only think of it! and only think of the parishes which get these spectral Helps as regular sermons! This Homiletic Bone-house contains no fewer than twenty-five hundred "skeletons," and however vigorous or affecting they might be when Simeon himself lived in them, they are now too many and exceeding dry.

As presiding over a school of the prophets, Simeon's great defects were a want of grandeur in his views, and the absence of a gravitation-centre for his creed. His pupils might come forth sincere and painstaking parsons; but, overladen with truism and shackled by routine, they were not likely to prove venturesome missionaries or bold and original evangelists. His own propen

sity was more for well-divided sermons than for a theology newly inspired and anew adapted to the times. He loved to open texts; and it was rather to the sermon-fishery than to the field of battle that he sent his young divines. His outfit-present was not a sword but an oyster-knife; and if the "evangelicals" whom Arnold met were Simeonites, we do not wonder that they failed to command his reverence.

One thing must not be forgotten as shedding lustre on his Christian memory. He had continual heaviness, and great solicitude for Israel; and as he mightily helped to awaken throughout the evangelical Church a missionary zeal on their behalf, so in his dying thoughts, like the Lord himself, he earnestly remembered them still. And in the recollectedness and deep humility of that dying scene, there is something greater and more solemn than any obituary which we have read for many days. During his long and active life-disinterested, peremptory, and .single-eyed, he approved himself a faithful servant of his blessed Master. But the greatest good which he effected, we are disposed to think, is what he did directly, and still more what he did early. To our judgment he is not one of those men who can be widely or long transmitted. Already is all that was impulsive in him dying out, and we fear that some who exceedingly admired him once are forgetting what he taught them. And his own last days, we fear, were not quite so impulsive as his first. An ancient University and a hierarchical Establishment are to a fervent Evangelism like those Transatlantic lakes which are lined with attractive gravel. A stout arm, starting in deep water, may row a goodly distance; but as it nears the banks or skims the shallows, the boat will be slowed or arrested by the spell in the water. It would appear that even Simeon at last had felt to some extent the influence of this magnetic mud.

Financial History of England.

337

ART. II.-Doubleday's Financial History of England.

UNDER this title we have a series of letters, or pamphlets, describing the origin and growth of our public debt-our condition under its burdens-and the prospect in store for our creditors. Although the work is dignified with the title of a "History," Mr. Doubleday's claim to be considered an historian is yet to be established; for, acknowledging the clearness of his language, the originality of some of his views, and the industry with which he has illustrated the period embraced in his short account, it is to be regretted that his observations should have been characterized by unseemly and unjust vituperations on the greater part of the public men who have borne sway in this country since the Revolution, and by the attempt to propagate mischievous errorsviews in short, which, if adopted by his pupils and their contemporaries, the rising youth of England (for whose instruction he tells us that they are intended), would surely destroy the commercial honour, and, through it, the existence of Great Britain.

There has been from the commencement something untoward in the conduct of our financial operations. The most serious demands upon our energies-the struggles in which it was incumbent upon us to put forth the greatest efforts of strength in money, in arms by sea or by land-have been at those periods in which credit was lowest, money in fewer hands, and its holders therefore in a condition to dictate to Parliament the most onerous terms.

The greater part of the four hundred millions with which the war of the French Revolution may be debited, was borrowed in a depreciated currency; while receiving £60 or £70 in paper, we bound ourselves to pay £100, without stipulating that the lender should be reimbursed either in the same worthless material, or upon any equitable system of equivalents. The return to cash payments consequent upon Mr. Peel's Act of 1819, gave to the then holder of public securities an undue advantage, at the expense of nearly every other class in the country.

The account of the transactions under which our national debt

has grown upon us, dates mainly from the Revolution of 1688. The new and insecure Government of the Prince of Orange, and the strength of the Tory party, rendered it impossible to maintain the new order of things without a heavier outlay, and corresponding taxation; and, in spite of the Land-Tax of 1692, (equal to and which was in fact an Income and Property Tax of 20 per cent.) it was requisite to have recourse to a loan. Mr.

VOL. VII. NO. XIV.

Y

Doubleday's prejudices and feelings in reference to this period, have been so far allowed to warp his judgment as to hurry him into the unworthy assertion (whilst he sneers at the patriotism of the Russells and the Cavendishes,) that a main cause of the Revolution was the sordid desire, on the part of some of our greatest English nobles, to secure their ecclesiastical possessions from resumption by a Catholic Government and Priesthood, had James continued to reign in this country. Of such a design on the part of James II. there is no evidence; still less of any apprehension on the part of the holders of that property, that the king, had he been ever so desirous, could have caused them any disturbance in their enjoyment of it. More than a hundred and thirty years before that, his predecessor, Mary, had wished to restore to the Monasteries, and other ecclesiastical foundations, the estates of which they had been deprived. Although it was but eighteen years after Henry VIII.'s first Act, and though many of the original beneficiaries were then alive, and exciting sympathy by their misfortunes and faith in what was believed to be the superiority of their creed, the Queen was unable to carry her point. She restored, indeed, to the Catholic Church what remained in the hands of the Crown ungranted to private individuals; but with this she was forced to be content. Yet we are to be told that a hundred and thirty years after this project had been given up as hopeless by a most bigoted princess, and in an almost Catholic country, such a monarch as James II. could have alarmed his nobles into a deposition of him, from a suspicion that he may have had similar intentions. The period of the Revolution is not one which displays the best picture of the public virtue of the country; but the writer should have reflected, that it was by the relations, the friends, and the allies of that Sydney and that Russell, who sealed with their blood their devotion to our liberties, that arbitrary power was finally banished from England by the Revolution of 1688.

But this arbitrary period of the Stuarts finds strange favour in his eyes. Under the two last princes of that House, England, he says, though not honoured, was comfortable and prosperous. Their government, he contends, though oppressive towards the nobles, did not press with harshness on the great bulk of the people. In support of this view, the reader is told of the moderate amount of taxation under Charles II. and James II. While the Long Parliament averaged an income of from £4,385,000 to £4,860,000, Charles II. received only £1,800,000, and James, in the year he abdicated, a trifle over £2,000,000. He then sums up the instances of the prosperous state of the country:

"The interest of money was six or even eight per cent. in ordinary cases, the profits of trade were commensurate with this high rate of interest

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